Chapter 13 Becoming Pack #2
In a stalemate, the wolf knew, you must focus on incremental changes, any shift in the balance.
Was the pursuit of the outsider making him stronger?
Was it making his enemy stronger? How could tactics be changed to ensure the fight was enriching him and diminishing his foe?
If he couldn’t reach victory with a sprint, could he reach it an inch at a time?
He didn’t have the answers.
What he had was the imperative. Chase the thing. Understand the thing. Banish the thing.
He could grapple with the outsider’s mind, stilling its body with the assault.
That was something.
It mattered little because he too must still his body during the mind struggle. Two statues.
Stalemate.
Slow, stagnant, bitter stalemate.
The sun set and the wolf waited to feel the hateful touch of the deer on the land.
The deer bit into the sky’s fur during the day, hung there like a fat tick drinking the blood of the world.
It must.
Anywhere else and the wolf would have found its hiding place.
It came.
It blurred.
It ran.
It blurred.
It slowed.
It was by a human place. A horse place.
The wolf shot off as fast as a diving falcon, but he was a creature of matter and followed matter’s laws. He could not just blur through space like the enemy. Perhaps he could beg the mountain to shift him as fast as the deer, but pride said, Not yet.
When he arrived, he saw something surpassingly strange.
There was the deer, moving to destroy an old human for the crime of simply living.
And there was the not-man, charging the enemy, running in defense of the human.
Was that possible?
He was slow, but the deer was, what? Insulted by the very idea of his approach?
The deer turned.
The not-man faced it.
He had grown somehow.
He was not shivering in his den.
He should be dead.
He should not be able to stand against the frozen deer.
He should not be able to stand near the outsider thing.
He should be dead.
Instead, he was standing.
He was standing in service to the mountain.
For a moment, the wolf was stunned into stillness. Then he felt the outsider’s mind rumbling toward the not-man like a landslide. Trees tilting. Ground slipping like an ice flow.
Whatever else he was, the not-man was a pup and he had picked a fight with a crystal wight.
He would not fight alone.
The wolf sprang.
As he ran, he lent his thoughts to the not-man. It shouldn’t have been easy, but it was.
Easy as falling.
He closed the distance, mind and body, and the deer fled with its customary insult to physical customs of mass and motion.
But he had gotten closer this time.
Closer than ever before.
This was a change.
A chip in the stalemate.
“Well. It got away,” the not-man said.
Wonder upon wonders it was standing and speaking.
The wolf spoke back.
When was the last time he had a real conversation? When his mother was still in the shallows? When the scimitar cats told grim jokes and crimsoned the snow with their hunts?
A sound.
An ambush.
A tide of nothing.
Green and the horned wolf sat in a cool autumn nowhere and faced each other. The silence was a sheet of glass, a sonnet of smooth water, a deep pond in windless night.
Green touched the quiet first.
“I just lived your memory.”
The wolf studied the small creature. He looked shaken. He looked stubbornly awake, despite what it must be costing him.
Green cocked his head at the wolf’s assessment. Thoughts were different here. Too loud. Skulls were made of glass and minds were words floating in the air. No secrets.
And I lived your memories, not-man. The Crow King owes you an explanation.
“The what?”
The Crow King and his trade without your acceptance of the bargain. When you fell and the king ate your death without your leave to do so.
“I…don’t know what you’re saying. You saw when I fell in front of the bus? I don’t know what you mean by…a trade.”
The pain of the memory flew toward Green, a physical thing in the place where thought was substance. It flew on black wings.
He slapped it from the air and it vanished in a rain of ash and feathers.
The wolf studied Green.
You do not know your own memory?
Pain sparkled in the emptiness between them, growing where the flying agony fell, and the wolf traced its searing lines down to its roots.
“That memory…hurts. And I can’t understand it. That bird…the crow…just screamed at me.”
Perhaps you cannot understand it alone. Come.
“What? No. I can’t.”
But with the mountain guardian’s help, he could.
Green walked down a dark corridor. The wolf padded along beside him.
Here, an archway of verdant honeysuckle.
Seven-year-old Green mixed a potion of mulberries and creek water in a sun-faded blue bucket meant for molding sandcastle parapets.
They walked.
Here, an open door.
Jess tossed aside her keys hard enough to mark the drywall.
“Just don’t ask about my day anymore, okay? I hate this. I hate this job,” she said.
“Maybe it’s time to look for something else,” Green said.
“You were a fucking literature major. One of us needs to have a real career.”
They walked.
Sunlight filtered in through lace curtains.
Mr. Reynard looked up from his work gluing tiny gears to a mat with shaking fingers, adding wheels to a clockwork locomotive. He smiled at Green.
They walked.
The corridor fell away and Green was on a busy city sidewalk.
He watched himself walking toward the intersection.
“Hold on, I can’t do this again.”
You must. You can’t allow a terror to shelter inside your own skull.
His hand fell to his side, reaching for the acorn. Instead, his palm found the wolf, hard and cold as stone, but rippling like water. He left his hand on the wolf’s shoulder.
Together.
The Green of memory seemed to trip on nothing, then flail onto the crosswalk.
A man with graying dreadlocks gasped and reached for him, too late.
There was the bus, a heartbeat away, scuffed chrome and tinted windows, a toothpaste ad smiling joylessly above a line of rolling tires.
The Green lying on the pavement said nothing.
The Green standing beside the wolf on the sidewalk screamed as the tires met his prostrate form and the bus bounced six inches.
Then, everything went still.
All around, the world was frozen. Pedestrians balanced impossibly in mid-step. The man with the dreadlocks was caught trapped in a backward fall as if seated on an invisible chair. Passing traffic transformed into a parking lot.
A great sable shape swooped up and through the motionless bus, perching on the No Parking sign.
The crow had changed. It was more vivid now than in past memory, electric blue eyes and a silver sheen that danced across its dark feathers.
It was bigger than a man and its outstretched wings shadowed the entire sidewalk.
A foot above its head hovered a dingy patch of nothing in the shape of a seven-pointed star.
The Crow King. The wolf’s understanding was Green’s understanding. A master among corvid kind. A thing of time and memory. Subtlety and understanding. Trades and tricks. Formidable. Not to be trusted.
There was something writhing and inexplicable struggling in the crow’s beak. Green recognized it as his own. It was the moment of his death, plucked out of time, food for a strange monarch on a timeless street.
The crow tipped back his nickel-gray beak and, with a rapid stabbing motion, swallowed the grim moment whole. The recent death fought on the way down.
Green was no longer beneath the bus.
He was standing, struggling for breath, looking about him with wide, frantic eyes.
Time began to thaw, breaking loose, sluggish as melting river ice.
The newly re-alive Green looked up at the crow.
The crow cocked its head and regarded the man.
“You see us? Already?” the crow said in a deep, croaking voice. “We are perceived?”
The Green of memory heard only deep, mocking caws.
The Green accompanied by the wolf heard meaning in the speech.
The Crow King’s voice was a dirge.
Tears streamed down both Greens’ cheeks.
The crow ruffled his feathers and seemed to sigh with his entire body.
“Ah, our young and old associate. You know what was taken then? If you know, it cannot grow back. Absurd and troublesome. As usual.”
The crow shook its head.
“Disagreeable. A trade then. A proper trade.”
The great bird’s beak dipped beneath a wing and tossed something toward Green.
It was the acorn.
Green caught it, placed it in his pocket, then retrieved it again as though he didn’t know how it had arrived.
“If you must call upon our court at this early date, find us in the wilds. Unlikely. In plain sight. At the temple tree, above the place of memories. Yet, we would rather you did not. We have fulfilled our part. And dealings with you are always rather complicated.”
The king paused for a response.
Past-Green gaped, uncomprehending, panting, and clinging to his acorn.
Full movement returned to the world. The silence broke. The crow was gone.
The bus that had killed him moments before rumbled past untroubled. His skull remained whole and its contents within. The man with dreadlocks stood nearby, checking his phone and thinking nothing at all of Green’s welfare.
Green rubbed his temples.
He was back in the nowhere place, seated across from the horned wolf.
Now you remember.
He did.
We understand one another.
He gazed across the emptiness at the wolf. He did not feel grateful, but nor did he feel afraid.
“Well…wolf…I know you now, and I guess you know me, but what do I call you? What do you call yourself?”
I do not call myself.
Green sighed.
He knew the wolf. He knew him. The knowledge took away a gallon of fear and delivered an ocean of uncomfortable awe.
“But what can I call you? Humans name things.”
The wolf thought.
What do you call this mountain?
“Appalachians? Catskills? You want me to call you Catskill?”
Catskill. You may call me Catskill.
Green recalled reading the etymology of the name, a derivation of the Dutch for “wildcat creek,” Kaaterskill.
His thoughts shifted from a noisy creek to a trio of enormous house cats leaping through the pines.
The wolf saw his thoughts and brought a rhyming image up from memory, a tawny scimitar cat rolling with her cubs in late summer grass, laughing at the world.
“Catskill. Sure. I like it. Call me Green. ‘Not-man’ makes my stomach turn.”
The wolf stood suddenly and sniffed the air that was not air. He was missed. The mountains were calling him back, calling him to wakefulness and to duty.
Green felt the call and felt Catskill going to meet it.
“When we meet again, we’ll meet as friends?”
It was part statement and part question.
No, not friends.
Catskill thought of his mother’s words, of service to the mountains. Of family.
We are kin. We are pack.